Kubernetes 1.33 Release Adds Native Support for Container Sidecars
The latest release of Kubernetes, made available this week, adds 24 capabilities in alpha, with another 18 that were under previous development having been declared stable. At the same time, another 20 features have been elevated from alpha to beta status.
Nina Polshakova, release lead for Kubernetes 1.33 and a software engineer for Solo.io, said that among the capabilities that are now stable, the most anticipated is an ability to run container sidecar natively, which makes it possible to now orchestrate them alongside application containers. That’s crucial because many application containers have dependencies on sidecar containers that need to be instantiated before they can run. Previously, IT teams needed to manually ensure sidecars were running before application containers, a process that can now be orchestrated using Kubernetes.
Other capabilities that are now stable include a topology-aware routing and traffic distribution capability that optimizes service traffic across multi-zone clusters, an ability to more granularly control where pods can co-exist in a Kubernetes cluster and an ability to pre-populate volumes with data from various sources rather than being limited to PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) clones or volume snapshots.
Meanwhile, alpha capabilities being added for the first time include multiple extensions to the Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) application programming interface (API) that is used to request and share resources between pods and containers inside a pod, along with a configuration option that enables IT teams to set user preferences.
Existing alpha capabilities that are now available in beta include support an ability to use Linux User namespaces for pods to improve security, support for Direct Service Return (DSR) in Windows kube-proxy, a feature that allows return traffic routed through load balancers to bypass the load balancer and respond directly to the client, and an support for using Open Container Initiative (OCI) images as volumes in pods.
In general, version 1.33 of Kubernetes, codenamed Octarine: Color of Magic1, a nod to the Discworld series created by Terry Pratchett. Octarine itself is a mythical color that in the series can only be seen by wizards, witches and cats.
The overall goal is to continue to improve the stability of Kubernetes, while at the same time steadily introducing new capabilities in a way the community can collectively vet, said Polshakova.
It’s not clear how IT teams might be directly downloading Kubernetes versus waiting for providers of curated distributions to make this release available. The one clear thing, however, is that many IT teams are still finding it a challenge to keep current. As a result, many of them are still running older versions of Kubernetes even as the platform itself is updated three times a year. Version 1.33 will be followed by two additional releases this year.
Compounding that challenge is the fact that many IT teams are now trying to manage fleets of Kubernetes clusters that are not always running the same version of the platform. There is, however, no going back at this point. A recent survey conducted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) finds 80% of respondents work for IT organizations that have deployed Kubernetes in a production environment, with another 13% piloting or actively testing the platform. The issue now is finding better ways to manage an inherently complex platform that is now being deployed at increasingly higher levels of scale.
